


sloop (i want to go home)

by paranoid_mandroid



Category: Outer Banks (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Childhood best friends over weeks old teenage romance any day, Gen, What would have happened if instead of Sarah it was JJ on the Phantom?, and making grandiose declarations of love, canon relationships but not the focus, like calm down you're both still in highschool, these two crazy kids were really willing to die for each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:13:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24354868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paranoid_mandroid/pseuds/paranoid_mandroid
Summary: There are some worlds where JJ can bear to watch John B drive off in the Phantom, unsure if he was ever going to see him again.This is not that world.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 75





	sloop (i want to go home)

**Author's Note:**

> I need to be doing my online work but I came across a cover of my favourite band doing a cover of a Beach Boys song LITERALLY called Sloop John B. I had no choice. No beta we die like men. Enjoy :)

JJ could still feel his Dad’s grip on his shoulders, loose and stinking of bottom shelf whiskey. He tried to shake it off, a small shudder he hoped that Pope and Kie wouldn’t notice, but it stuck to his skin like motor oil. He kept his head down as he finished last minute preparations on the Phantom, a useless gesture as the pair were preoccupied exchanging glances over and over when they thought the other wasn’t looking.

Horseflies darted in and around his face as he carefully looped the anchor line. The rope flowed smoothly through his callused hands, the movements deft and familiar, even as his knuckles stung from where they had split open during their earlier fight with Rafe and his Dad’s shithead dealer Barry.

“Everything sorted up there, JJ?” Pope called from the grass below the slip.

JJ secured the line with a final knot and then stuck a diver’s okay sign high up in the air.

“All good bro! Just waiting for prince Charming to show his pretty head.”

“He said he’d be here by now, right? Like I’m not just imagining that he’s late?” Kie was biting her lip, worrying scraps of dried skin between her teeth. Her eyes scanned from the road to Pope and back again, but John B still didn’t materialise. Pope came up beside her and hesitated, before laying a careful arm across her shoulders. The air between the two of them seemed charged, like in the aftermath of Hurricane Agatha when powerlines were strewn throughout the streets and every tangle of wires screamed potential death trap.

The sight of them made JJ feel off kilter. So much had changed in the past few weeks, and seeing that Pope and Kie were settling into whatever thing they had going on solidified the feeling that even if they made it through this day, this hour, nothing would ever be the same again.

A low rumble of a car engine split the air. The sight of a cop car pulling into the docking site sent the trio scurrying around the Phantom, ready to push off and try to salvage John B’s method of escape.

“Shit,” Kie hissed, throwing the last few provisions left out on the grass into the boat.

“C’mon JJ!” Pope called out as JJ struggled to work knots out of lines with numb fingers. He felt like all the blood had rushed out of his body and bile was working it’s way up his throat as he worked the rope, repeating old mantras in his head that every salt born kid from the Cut had learned in place of nursery rhymes. _Right over left and left over right, makes the knot neat and tidy and tight._ JJ couldn’t tell if it was his Dad’s or Big John’s voice in his head coaching him through it.

The car door open and instead of Shoupe’s salt and pepper scowl John B poured out. The dark circles around his eyes were so dark JJ felt a sympathy wince of pain before realizing they were from lack of sleep not a fist to the face.

“John B! What- how?” Kie didn’t let John B answer before launching into a hug. John B chuckled softly and held her just as tight in return.

“Yeah, what gives man? You always shot down my suggestions to take a pig-mobile out for a spin.” JJ forced lightness into his voice as he ragged on John B. The hugging pair broke apart and John gently bumped knuckles with JJ.

“I’m getting out of here, figured I’d better cross it off my bucket list before it’s too late.” A small smile tugged at John B’s mouth, but it barely reached his eyes as they looked at each other.

JJ clapped a hand onto John B’s shoulder and pressed the keys to the Phantom into his best friend’s palm. “All yours, baby. Was a bitch to get but she’s here and looking as beautiful as ever.”

Pope winced and moved past JJ to greet John B. “C’mon. No one else wants to hear about your love affair with the freaking boat, and John B needs to get going, anyway.”

John B laughed and scanned the group, as if looking for a specific person to share the joke with. In a split second his grin shuttered. An ashy colour fought past his tanned skin as the blood drained from his face. His breathing sped up and he spun in a circle, movements winding up into franticness.

“Where’s Sarah? She should be here by now. We got separated but she had a head start, she should be here, where is she?”

Stepping forward, JJ stilled John B with a hand curled at the back of his head, forcing them to meet eye to eye.

“Hey, hey! Slow down. She hasn’t shown up. But Pope’s right, you don’t have time for this shit.”

John B started protesting, but JJ cut him off. “No! Shut up, you know you have to leave now or you’ll never get out. Around the point and across the sound to Dismal swamp, right? Dismal swamp, then overland and crossing the border at Brownsville. Gotta be Brownsville, alright? Then hang around in Mexico, and we’ll all meet up in two months. You got that John B?”

He nodded, too overwhelmed for words. JJ cuffed him around the ear. “No, I need to say you have this.” JJ’s voiced hitched slightly at the last words, but he swallowed it down. “You got to promise me you have this.”

Letting out a long exhale, John B stared back into JJ’s eyes and repeated his words back to him. “Around the point to the sound. Dismal swamp. Brownsville.”

JJ let go of John B and watched him hoist himself onto the Phantom. The back of his throat was sharp and painful, like when you go under whilst surfing and swallow a mouthful of saltwater. His stomach was tied into a wreath of knots.

_Right over left and left over right, makes the knot neat and tidy and tight._

To JJ’s right, Pope and Kie were holding hands. There was still dark blood encrusted on Pope’s knuckles from their earlier encounter with Rafe and Larry like barnacles on an old dock pole. With their fingers intertwined, JJ couldn’t tell whose hand it was that was shaking.

John B turned around to look back at the three of them, standing shoulder to shoulder in a line. He opened his mouth and let it fall closed again several times. Maybe in another world he would have had words to give to the Pogues. Be able to look them in the eyes, and then give them up, not knowing when they would be able to meet again. In another world John B could have been the protagonist destined to drive off into the sunset, alone in a forty-year-old smuggling ship with nothing but desperation and a dream.

Maybe in another world John B wasn’t as scared as he was right then.

JJ took in the tremble running through John B, the glaze to his eyes and possessive way in which he drank in the last sight of his friends. He clenched his jaw and stared back at John B, willing away the thrumming of his fast twitch muscles calling him to action. The OBX had a rope cinched around his heart, anchoring him to the Cut and the Volkswagen and every beach he’d ever surfed and footpath he’d skinned his knees on. JJ couldn’t leave Outer Banks without cutting out a piece of himself and throwing it overboard as fish chum.

In the end it wasn’t even a decision.

JJ launched himself over the side of the Phantom and pulled John B into a bruising hug.

“Can’t believe you almost left behind your best navigator, man. Pretty fucking careless.”

Sobbing out a laugh, John B pushed away from JJ and looked him in the eyes, searching for any sign of uncertainty. Finding none, he turned back to Kie and Pope. “I love you guys, alright?”

The four friends, divided by the low side of the Phantom, stood together in the golden haze of the late afternoon. Buzzing between them like late spring mayflies were years upon years of memories of a childhood full of misadventure and chaos, bonfires and sand. No further words were spoken.

John B and JJ set off from the dock with practiced ease, moving around each other with ingrained muscle memory. Pope and Kie were left standing on the shore watching their friends grow smaller and smaller as the faint sound of sirens cut through the air.

“It’s only two months. We can do two months.” Pope forced out, rubbing his thumb hesitantly across the back of her hand.

Kie buried her face in the crook of Pope’s neck and started crying.

* * *

Despite always being surrounded by people, Sarah Cameron had been abandoned a lot in her life. From her Mother passing away when she was younger to her and Kie’s painful separation only a few short years ago, Sarah had learned quick that it was far less painful to push others away first before they could leave on their own volition.

It was in contradiction to her own nature that Sarah sprinted down the pier, blisters forming in her drenched canvas shoes. The sky was bruised overhead and a sharp wind cut through her wet clothes but all she could think about was the warmth of John B’s arms wrapped around her and the smell of salt in his curls.

“You better not leave without me, I swear John B,” she huffed in time with her heavy breathing.

Reaching the end of the pier, Sarah skidded to a halt and began scanning the horizon. The distant whirring of helicopter blades were in synch with the rapid beat of her heart. Far from shore she could just make out the blur of a speedboat chopping through the waves, receding into the distance.

“John B! Hey!” Sarah yelled at the retreating form until her voice was hoarse. Tears caught in her throat as she sunk down, the wooden pier digging painfully into her knees. Hunched over, she wrapped her arms around her torso and let herself cry.

A different world may have been kinder to Sarah Cameron, but in this one she was once again left alone.

* * *

JJ and John B sat on the floor of the Phantom, trying not to drown in the oppressive dark of the night. Crackles from radios and barked orders drifted from the patchwork command tent, hundreds of metres away but seeming close enough to touch. The pair breathed together, in and out, matching the waves slapping at the side of the Phantom.

“How long will it take for the tide to take us out, do you reckon?” John B murmured to his best friend. The words broke through the silence like the lightning strikes crashing through the skyward storm clouds, sharp and sudden.

JJ hummed in consideration. “Hours, likely, though the storm out south should help.”

He twisted his body and looked around over the side of the boat, straining as if he could read the waves through the sea of black on black. John B hooked an arm around his shoulders and pulled him back into a seated position, leaning their heads together.

“Nothing to do but wait, then.” John B’s voice was low and patient, trying to suppress JJ’s anxious energy.

The minutes dragged on with the tide, slow and inexorable. The gentle rolling of the Phantom was at odds with the tension lying thick in the air like a layer of fog. JJ was tapping out a senseless rhythm on his knee with the palm of his hand. Both boys had their eyes trained on the shoreline, on guard for any burst of movement which might suggest their location had been discovered.

They waited.

* * *

His Dad had always warned Pope about the inherent danger of being poor and Black around cops, but his skin had never crawled as it had then, sitting beside Kie on a cheap plastic chair with a gun strapped officer ten years his senior and twice his size staring them down.

They had been rounded up shortly after John B and JJ had driven away on the Phantom. Deputy Shoupe had interrogated them with a franticness that sat on him poorly, wild eyes exposing just how far gone the death of Sheriff Peterkin had pushed him. Their appeals to John B’s innocence fell on deaf ears, and once it became obvious they weren’t going to turn on their friend Pope and Kie were sent to a separate tent to wait on news, any news, just like everyone else.

Kie’s eyes were red but dry. They shared warmth through their shoulders, pressed tightly together, unknowingly mirroring JJ and John B only an open ocean away.

Yells erupted from outside the tent. Sarah Cameron’s voice was rough but loud, followed by her father’s attempts to placate her which spiked Pope’s heart rate. The girl in question burst through the tent opening, shadowed by a cop attempting to restrain the righteous fury of a sixteen-year-old girl. Emphasis on ‘trying’.

“You’re a fucking psychopath! You killed John B’s father and you killed Peterkin, who knows, you’ll probably try and kill me too! Stop trying to touch me!” Sarah’s tears did nothing to diffuse the anger radiating from her words, pushing Ward back a step as he entered Pope’s field of vision. Ward was holding his hands palms up towards her in feigned appeasement and accompanied by both Shoupe and the federal agent who Pope had deduced during their interrogation oversaw the whole manhunt.

“Sweetie, you’re not thinking clearly. Have you taken your meds? Let’s go home and get them.” There was an edge to Ward’s voice, pleading taking on a darker threatening tone.

Kie stepped up and wrapped Sarah’s fingers in her own. “What are you talking about, Ward? Sarah’s not on any medication? What are you lying about now?”

The stern-faced agent stepped forward and looked between the feuding parties. His brow was furrowed, trying to fit the conflicting puzzle pieces together into a coherent narrative. “Kiara, right? Can you confirm that Sarah here is diagnosed with bipolar disorder?”

“What? No, Ward’s lying, like he’s been lying this entire time.” Kie’s own anger was rearing its head, cool and sharp in contrast with Sarah’s fiery outburst.

Pope fought past the fear cementing his feet to the ground and stood up in line with his friends. He sought out Shoupe’s gaze, familiar like everyone’s who lived in the Outer Banks with him.

“Shoupe, you know that this doesn’t make sense. John B’s gotten in trouble before, sure, but he would never shoot Peterkin.” Pope pleaded, throat constricting.

Shoupe looked downwards, then towards the agent for the lead. The agent moved towards Ward with his hand on his hip, conspicuously near his holster.

“I think you and I need another conversation.”

Pope tuned out Ward’s loud denials as the agent escorted him out and remained focused on deputy Shoupe. “You have to find them. John B and JJ could die out in that storm.”

At that Shoupe narrowed his eyes. “Maybank’s out there as well? Should’ve known, those two have always been inseparable.” Shoupe clapped him on the shoulder and Pope barely suppressed a flinch. “We’ll find them son, and then we’ll get to the bottom of this whole mess, whatever happened.”

All the adults left the tent apart from their still silent guard, but the trio bore them no more attention. Instead, Kie wrapped her arms around Sarah and gently rocked the girl, softly shushing as Sarah broke down into sobs. Pope hesitated a moment before joining them. They stood there, enveloped in each other’s arms.

They waited, and hoped for a better world than the one they had been living in for the past few days.

* * *

The lights came on in a rolling wave, starting at the richer ends of Figure Eight and swinging round to illuminate the Cut. The breath caught in John B’s chest as the lighthouse beam flickered and started scanning across the ocean’s dark waters. Pausing for a moment, the boys exchanged a look before exploding into action.

They moved fluidly and in concert, John B darting to the motor to start up the engine while JJ was already at the helm aiming the Phantom for safety.

The Phantom lurched across the waves with stomach turning speed, John B gripping onto the boat with his right hand and steadying JJ’s lower back with the left. Numerous police boats were in hot pursuit. Their sirens lanced through the air sharper than any shore bird.

“They’re gonna catch us, JJ.”

“Don’t underestimate her, man, she knows these waters better than any pig in the water!” JJ shouted back over the waves breaking on the front of the boat.

In place of a response John B clutched the back of JJ’s shirt tighter and forced their eyes to meet. They silently fought back and forth, before JJ groaned in submission and wrenched both his gaze and the wheel southward.

“We have to go through the storm, then. No one’s stupid enough to try and follow us through it.”

John B barked out a laugh and turned his face upwards, looking up at the stars. “Only two constants in life, right? The north star and JJ Maybank being a crazy son of a bitch.”

“We don’t have time for your astrology bullshit right now, man! Tell me my horoscope some other time!”

That’s how the two boys faced the storm, head on and laughing. The police boats soon fell back, distant solid forms bobbing in their wake. Rain and seawater whipped into their eyes indiscriminately. Thunder boomed nearby, melting into the cacophony of motor and wind and waves crashing against the hull.

Maybe if they weren’t so far from shore the radio signal would’ve been stronger, but in all worlds JJ was born with the taste of salt and speed and freedom on his tongue and they were already too far away. They couldn’t hear the faint breaking of the radio hailing them. JJ and John B kept on into the storm.

John B grabbed life jackets for them both and helped JJ into his whilst the blonde boy was wrestling the wheel against the sea. He braced them both as much as he could and shouted directly into JJ’s ear.

“Saltwater cowboys, just like you always say!”

JJ whooped into the night and turned back to John B with a manic grin. “Saltwater cowboys baby!”

There may be worlds where JJ wouldn’t follow John B to the ends of the earth, and vice versa.

This world was not one of them.

They went further into the storm.

**Author's Note:**

> Do they make it through the storm? Are they rescued? Do they pull their heads out of their asses and actually call their friends to let them know they're alive? Who knows, certainly not me it's 3 am and I'm going to bed. Choose whatever outcome brings you the most happiness.


End file.
